Oddbean

Here’s a rational argument against his position from someone living very near to Russia. You might even visit here if you choose to attend the next Nostr Unconference :) What riles me up the most is his gripe about “NATO expanding and encroaching on Russian interests”. Here’s the thing. We worked very hard to get into NATO for more than a decade. Look up Vaira Vike Freiberga NATO speech. We wanted to get in because we never wanted the repeat of Russian occupation. We barely survived the last one as a nation. He can’t wrap his mind around the idea that people might have a will of their own that they exercise through action. From our point of view it was us who wanted out of the Soviet Union , we took action to achieve that (see Baltic Way, barricades). We wanted to get into EU and NATO. We took action and achieved that. It’s not Soviet Union breaking apart, and NATO expanding. We did it, even though nobody apart from us was very keen on either idea. From this perspective, we understand Ukrainians. They wanted to rid themselves from corrupt pro-Moscow president who wanted to nix the EU association agreement. They took action, and achieved it. To punish them, Russia annexed Crimea, and invaded the country. Then launched a full scale invasion 8 years later to destroy Ukrainians as people and as a nation. He can’t stomach the fact that people can have a will that they express through action. He can’t stomach the fact that people would want the freedom to choose their own government.

Thanks for sharing your perspective. That helps me understand the situation better. I am under the impression that Latvia is fairly independent and that Belarus is more or less a puppet government of Russia. Does that match your view of the situation?

@Janis can correct me, but my impression was that Latvia spent over a decade digging Russian agents out of every branch of its state. (Something that Ukraine started to do aggressively from 2014 onwards.)

Yeah, pretty much. We basically started the government, the military, the intelligence services from scratch right away. Whereas in Ukraine initially the same Soviet institutions persisted. Including the personnel. But there are reasons for that. Our historical situation was markedly different. Latvia was a full fledged nation during the whole interwar period. One that was well developed industrially and socially. Think interwar Denmark or Finland. So from our perspective, and also according to internation law, we restarted that country, treating the Soviet Period as illegal occupation. As we didnt want a repeat of that situation we single mindedly took the geopolitical course "as far away from Russia as we can get". For all the other ex-Soviet countries apart from the Baltics the situation was different in that for them the independence sort of 'happened'. E.g., they didnt spend late eighties trying to get out of it. So then the response was different too.

I think both Russia and Ukraine share the experience of never really having been nation-states. They both alternated between being regions of an empire and semi-anarchy. I have friends who went through the 90s in both, and I think we're very forgetful in the West about how total that collapse was. There wasn't any model of common knowledge for them to snap back to :/

Sort of. Except Russia is the empire. There are still many federation subjects with their own "titular" ethnicities. Bashkirs, Tatars, Karelians, and more. I think that's part of the problem that they can't figure out of they're running a nation state or an empire. But yeah, Russia hasn't successfully run a democracy for a meaningful period of time. So they don't have the collective memory to fall back on how to run a democratic country. They then believe en-masse that it's not actually possible, and that it's a sham everywhere. It really looked like there was a period after the Soviet Union where they really tried to run a "normal" country. Then that didn't work out, so they fell back to what they're used to - having a tsar. If you look at Russian history, that's a recurring pattern. They try to modernize and be like any other European country, then that doesn't work, then they become antagonistic to the West. Then they lag behind in development. Then someone figures to try and modernize and be "normal". Rinse and repeat. I hope they can somehow break out of that cycle eventually.

A genuine Russo-Futurism would be beautiful. 50 ton nuclear bullet trains sweeping over the tundra carrying CosmoX rockets to their Siberian launchpads. They could do so much with their interior's resources and the education they inherited from the Soviet era. But, no, Moscow needed to antagonise and go to war with the most culturally Russophile state in Eastern Europe 🤦‍♂️

Latvia ia nowadays a boring western country - EU, euro, NATO, IKEA, rising housing costs, bitching about our democratically elected government, the works. Belarus is run by a dictator whose wet dream is to run a combined Belarus-Russia country. Even huge mass action by the population three years ago after the last sham election didn't manage to depose him. During the protests getting anally raped using a police baton, or beaten to death in police custody was a very real threat. I'm sure the people of Belarus will eventually achieve their freedom. And then they won't let another strongman anywhere near the government.